Elizabeth Scott
Elizabeth Leonard Scott (born November 23, 1917 in Fort Sill , Oklahoma , † December 20, 1988 in Berkeley (California) ) was an American statistician and astronomer .
Scott went to University High School in Berkeley (California) and then studied astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley , where she received her doctorate in 1949 with Robert Julius Trumpler . Since she could only work to a limited extent as an astronomer at the time, she worked partly for Jerzy Neyman in the statistics faculty, and half of her dissertation was devoted to astronomy and half to statistics. From 1951 she was in the Faculty of Mathematics at Berkeley, where she stayed for the rest of her career. Scott became a close collaborator of Neyman and published a lot with him and himself, in particular, on astronomy from a statistical perspective, for example on galaxy clusters with application to the possibility of deciding between different cosmological theories. Here the Scott Effect is named after her, the observation that more distant galaxy clusters contain more galaxies on average and thus have a higher absolute brightness. Another research area of Scott was the application of statistics in meteorology, for example in the 1950s to 1970s current question of the artificial generation of rain, where it accompanied several well-known large field experiments. In medicine, she dealt with skin cancer and its dependence on UV radiation. As an expert in statistics, she also dedicated herself to the task of proving inequalities in pay between men and women at universities for the US Association of University Teachers.
In 1981 she became an honorary member of the Royal Statistical Society . She was Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1970 to 1971 , was Vice President of the International Statistical Institute from 1981 to 1983, and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1977 to 1978 . From 1983 to 1984 she was President of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability.
The Elizabeth L. Scott Award for Statistics has been presented in her honor since 1992.
Web links
- Publications by EL Scott in the Astrophysics Data System
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Elizabeth Scott. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Biography at Agnes Scott College
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Scott, Elizabeth |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Scott, Elizabeth Leonard |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American statistician and astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 23, 1917 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Fort Sill |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 20, 1988 |
| Place of death | Berkeley, California |